Confidential Client

Prototyping a Patient Room for Long-term Care


Patient rooms are critical spaces for residents in long-term care facilities. When designing a new long-term care facility for retired veterans, our team used a combination of physical and digital prototyping to evalute the design and of a typical patient room.

Problem:
What are the critical questions when designing a typical patient room for the veterans at a long-term care facilities?

My Role:
Designer and User Researcher

Contributions:
Designed and built the full-scale prototype, developed and collected user feedback through tours, user group meetings, and questionnaire surveys

Time:
Three months

00 Context

Patient Rooms in Long-term Care Environment

Patient rooms are critical spaces for residents, especially in long-term care facilities. The increased desire for a sense of home and privacy, as well as the social well-being of patients, calls for a more customized design solution to the space. Mockups have become an increasingly important element in the design process. Each patient room is a single bedroom with an inbound bathroom. In addition, each room provides ample storage space for personal items and medical supplies.

Strategic planning is essential in ensuring the success of a mock-up. The team carefully considered the objectives and project schedule to decide the level of detail and evaluation methods.

the process of design, fabricate, and evaluation Our team decided the primary goals of the mock-up were:

  • Evaluate the general layout the room
  • Evaluate the storage space for staff use and private storage
  • Examine the accessibility features of the bedroom and the bathroom
  • Assess the bathroom configuration
  • Collect feedback on the workflow and user experience of different core groups
  • Experiment with design changes by modifying the mock-up

01 Process

Planning and Fabricating the Prototype

During the first meeting with the client, we discussed the overview and history of the neighborhood and came up with the key goals for this project.

the process of design, fabricate, and evaluation

02 Evaluate

Collecting Feedback Through Evaluation

We carried out a two-month evaluation process, during which we conducted open house tours, dedicated user group workshop, design meetings and collected feedback via questionnaires and sticky notes. We received 30 survey responses and more than 100 sticker note comments. Feedback analysis let us change several design features and enabled us to attain variance from the MAAB. site research

03 Iterate

Analyzing feedback and Re-iterate

We carried out a two-month evaluation process, during which we conducted open house tours, dedicated user group workshop, design meetings and collected feedback via questionnaires and sticky notes. We received 30 survey responses and more than 100 sticker note comments. Feedback analysis let us change several design features and enabled us to attain variance from the MAAB.